Words and Works from a Seattle Author

Locked Up with Daphne

What? You thought that just because I posted a book giveaway on Wednesday, there wasn’t going to be a regular post this week? Silly rabbit.

Reading is usually an escape for me, but while in COVID-lockdown, it’s been a challenge. Oh, I can read news articles fine (although I could do with fewer of them), but fiction? I just can’t seem to marshal the requisite mental focus to immerse myself in a novel. My mind is too easily distracted, too easily pulled out of the narrative, and I can only concentrate for twenty or so pages at a time, which frustrates me and compounds the problem.

Last week, though, I thought “Ah, but short stories!” A short story I figured I could handle, so I picked up a collection we’d recently brought home. The Birds and Other Stories, by Daphne du Maurier.

My first introduction to du Maurier’s fiction came via Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca.” It’s a great movie and I recommend it highly, but the novel, ah, the novel! So many interesting and unusual choices in style and structure, with beautiful prose paintings and deep character studies. The book and movie both garnered deserved praise.

But, chances are, your introduction to Daphne came from a different du Maurier/Hitchcock collaboration, specifically “The Birds.” It was with this short story, written circa 1952, that I sat down, in an attempt to get my mind off All Things COVID.

Reading “The Birds” was an interesting journey. First, it’s obvious at the outset that Hitchcock took massive liberties with the source material. Where the story follows a wounded WWII veteran, now a farm hand, in a remote section of Britain’s Cornish coast, the movie follows a socialite in San Francisco and the Pacific Coast. Where the movie centers on the burgeoning romance and the insertion of the socialite into an already established female hierarchy of mother, sister, and ex-lover, the story focuses solely on the farm-hand’s nuclear family: husband, wife, and two children. On the
“similarities” side of the ledger, both story and movie are spare in setting and straightforward in action. Also, it is possible to see how some scenes in the story were translated into film, despite being very much changed. But there is one thing that binds story and movie together, permeating both: existential dread.

As we recall the movie, most of us tend to remember a constant build-up of tension. Small-scale events mount, one upon the other, with increasing intensity and danger, all building, building, building. But neither story nor movie are actually structured like that. du Maurier knew (and Hitch agreed) that tension is more effectively built when it comes in waves, cycles of rising and falling action, seiches that roar in to inundate us before they ebb, and in this “The Birds” excels as it ties that pattern, that coming-and-going of danger, to the physical tides of the sea.

du Maurier’s works are often shot through with ambiguity and she was unafraid to leave resolution to the last moment (or to jettison it entirely), and “The Birds” is no exception. There is no “big red bow” at the end. Nothing is really wrapped up, especially not in a neat and tidy way. This does more than leave us with a lack of satisfactory resolution, though—and herein, I feel, we experience du Maurier’s genius—as it allows that sense of dread, that fear, to persist beyond the story’s end. Some books you can close after the last page and sigh, a smile on your face, even if it didn’t end particularly well for the characters, but in “The Birds,” one leaves the ultimate paragraph still worried, still infused with anxiety, still concerned for the little family on the Cornish coast, all which give the story life beyond the final page. It not only sticks with us; it dogs us, for days.

In retrospect, reading a story of a family trapped in their home while an incomprehensible danger prowls the countryside may not have been the best choice for a guy stuck in his home, praying that the plague roaming his streets will pass over his sanitized doorposts, but I survived “The Birds” well enough. Personally, though well aware of the parallels between myself and the characters, what touched me most, what disturbed me most, was a line spoken by the mother of the family:

“Won’t America do something?” said his wife. “They’ve always been our allies, haven’t they? Surely America will do something?”

In post-war Britain, America was still seen as a strong ally, a friend who would help a friend in time of need, even if we only managed it at the eleventh hour. Today, I fear we are not seen in the same light. We can no longer be counted upon to help our longtime friends, even at the eleventh hour. Sadly, it was this feeling, rather than the lingering dread of du Maurier’s story, that has stayed with me in the days since reading it.

4 Responses

I really enjoy reading the biographies of authors. Some that I have read in recent years were about Harper Lee, James Herriot and Tolkien. I read a biography called Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters, by James Dunn, published in 2013. He wrote that the three sisters did not attend school and were isolated from other people, leading to extensive use of imagination in their childhood playtimes. The author thought that Daphne’s insecurity about her husband’s former fiancée, was the source of the angst in the book, Rebecca.